This year’s World Press Freedom Index is heavily affected by the condition in Kashmir where it was impossible for journalists to cover the situation.
New Delhi| From a total of 180 countries, India is now ranked at 142 slipping two places on the 2020 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders. India’s rank has been dropping in the World Press Freedom Index for 4 years in a row.
In 2016, India climbed 3 places to rank 133 after which there has been a steady decline.
RSF’s latest report credits India’s rank to the Narendra Modi’s government “tightening” its grip on the media, and compelling it to “toe the Hindu nationalist government’s line”.
Interestingly, the report was released just a day after the J&K Police was accused of targeting two journalists in Kashmir.
A photojournalist from Kashmir, Masrat Zahra, has been booked under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), an anti-terror law that carries a jail term of up to 7 years. Posts for which the journalist has been booked are not yet informed.
In five years until 2019, India has recorded at least 198 serious attacks on journalists, and of these, 36 happened in 2019 alone. 6 of these happened during the protests over the contentious CAA.
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“With no murders of journalists in India in 2019, as against six in 2018, the security situation for the country’s media might seem, on the face of it, to have improved. However, there have been constant press freedom violations, including police violence against journalists, ambushes by political activists, and reprisals instigated by criminal groups or corrupt local officials,” RSF’s reports say.
The coordinated hate campaigns waged on social networks against journalists are “alarming,” the report said.
The report highlighted that campaigns are particularly virulent when the targets are women.
Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), or Reporters Without Borders also emphasized on the criminal prosecutions used to gag journalists critical of the authorities by invoking Section 124A of the IPC which lays down the punishment of life imprisonment for sedition.
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